Alumni Oration

"U.N.B. Writers of Sixties and the New Dominion" Daily Gleaner (19 May 1933). (UA Case 67a, Box 2)

I should like to speak to you for a few minutes about a small group of men who graduates from these halls. Because of the genuineness of their emotional experiences, the sincerity of their thoughts, and the memorable way in which they clothed their dreams and desires, they not only made this University a corner stone of the Canadian Palace of Art, but also established firmly the only real and lasting dynasty we recognize in our Dominion, that royal company of poets and seers. Their mantle falls upon all of us to-day. From henceforth we are a part of that great tradition.

The Sixties

King’s College was founded in this city, in 1828, and the University of New Brunswick in 1860. A memorable year was 1860 in the history of Canada. In that year Leonard Tilley, Premier of New Brunswick, dreamed of a Maritime Federation. In 1860 Charles G.D. Roberts was born ten miles up the Saint John, at Douglas, later moving with his family to Westcock Parsonage. The following year, Bliss Carman, Archibald Lampman, Wilfred Campbell and Pauline Johnson were born, and the Group of the Sixties was complete.

The Growth of Nationhood

It is difficult for you, no doubt, to imagine just what those births meant to Canada. Up to this time there has been no conscious tradition, no nationhood. Although this soil was built on heroic proportions and had measured the shadows of heroic men, our ideals were still borrowed from elsewhere. Now you can not have a birthright nation whose political fashions come from London, whose industrial fashions are derived from Wall Street, whose sartorical fashions are imported from Paris, and whose spiritual fashions are harvested from everywhere. It would not be a nation at all; it would be an air plant.

Until 1860 many thought we were in rather a bad way. Thomas D’Arcy McGee, speaking at Montreal in 1867, said that we did not own many great writers, judged by world standards, but that such men as we did have—Haliburton, Howe, Garneau, Heavysege and Sangster—were calculated to our own meridian. That is true of every country and age. While much of our literature was derivative, it was rich in high courage, in the robust qualities of the pioneers. The French, Puritan and Loyalist traditions each contributed something to this frontier literature, tenacious patriotism, strong moral purpose and healthy mysticism. Out of these fierce loyalties sprang a birthright literature and art.

And then the Group of the Sixties was born, with Roberts at its head, and everything changed. In the very year that the Quebec Conference was held Francois Xavier Garneau died, which reminds us of a parallel tradition in French Canada. Etienne Parent had blazoned across the top of his paper: "Notre Langue, Nos Institutions et Nos Lois!" That legend became the rallying cry of the national group in Quebec. It fired Garneau to writer his epoch-making Histoire. Cremazie turned the history of his people into epic verse; Frechette fashioned it into rhetorical song; De Gaspe supplemented it with tales of les anciene Canadiens; Gerin Lajoie built it into a romance, and it has influenced every writer and artists, teacher and statesman in Quebec to this day.

The Interpreters

From all this you will have guessed the importance of those first authentic voices of the new Dominion, those birthright spokesmen and interpreters of this young child of nations. It is a good thing that, when the political roll of the nations is called, Canada should stand in her place and count one as a nation in its own right. But it is a greater thing that, when the spiritual roll of the nations is called, she should also count one, judged by her contributions to beauty, truth and urbanity.

My time is all too short to tell of those who have passed through these halls, to adorn the intellectual life of the nation. But I must speak of three, whose names are written in letters of hold upon the pantheon of our national letters: Charles G.D. Roberts, Bliss Carman and Francis Sherman.

The World of the Time

Roberts was born in 1860, Carman in 1861, and Sherman in 1871. Canada was a frontier nation, both socially and spiritually. Its epic was federation, and its lyrics were highways and railroads. It may assist you in recalling the world of that time if I remind you that Darwin’s Origin of Success appeared in 1859, that Schopenhauer died in 1860, and that Ibsen’s A Doll’s House was published in 1879. Forces were at work which ushered in a new age, intellectually and socially.

George R. Parkin

At Westcock Parsonage Roberts, his sister Elizabeth, and his brothers Theodore Goodridge and William, had drunk deep the wine of the old tradition, but there above “the journeying tides of Fundy,” they had also breathed the beauty and the spirit of the new Dominion. Moving to Fredericton they found themselves in the flood tide of the spirit of the times. George Parkin in the Grammar School, and George Foster in the University, made the Golden Age of Greece and the Silver Age of Rome living realities. They could match the parallel lives of Plutarch with master men of their own race and time, knit the deeds of lost empires with the budding of new nations, and sing the songs of Homer, Virgil and Horace, Swinburne and Arnold as if time knew no forward of back. Little wonder, then, that young Roberts and Carman made verse translations of the Greek and Latin poets, and early experimented with their own singing periods. And what a group they moved in, Barry Straton, their cousin, Ganong, Hazen, Bridges, Raymond, MacLaren and Carter. Has any Canadian university an equal?

The Young Editor and Professor

Roberts left the university at nineteen, married , and the following year published his first book, Orion. The young principle of Chatham Grammar School was called to be the Goldwin Smith’s editor, in Toronto, at the age of twenty-three. From the week he went to King’s as professor, and enjoyed the ten most fruitful years of his life. Roberts wrote Carman, who had proceeded to Edinburgh University, that both has a mission as interpreters of the young Dominion. They both felt that they were called to an apostolate, and such it proved. Joined in birth by the ties of kinship, fellow students and playmates through youth, pilgrims together into forests and far places as young men, champions and strengtheners of each other to the end—they explained Canada to herself, interpreted her to others, and heralded to the world the birth of a new land of song.

His Fecundity

Roberts was a school boy of only seventeen when "Memnon" appeared in Scribner’s. When many are just squaring away for life’s work, he had turned out volumes of poetry, fiction, animal stories (of which he was the pioneer), historians and translations. Into these multiplying golden vessels he impatiently poured the rich wine of his life, or in his own words:

"To Beauty and to Truth I heaped
My sacrificial fires."
(Recompense)

He not only reflected, but in himself epitomized, the beauty, the traditions and the enterprises of these Maritimes.

Reflects the Spirit of the Maritimes

Why should not a Maritime University explore these writers? Why not deliberately build them into the great tradition of English literature where they belong? These men drank their all of beauty here in the Valley of the Saint John, in the Tantramar meadowlands, upon the Ardise hills, and in Grand Pre. Then why not since their lips were nourished and their eyes ravished by this fair, dear land, why not make the beauty they knew lead to beauty everywhere?

Do the Maritimes speak in "Indian Summer," "The Clearing," "Fredericton in May," "Time," "Canadian Streams," "The Silver Thaw"? Where indeed, do they not speak?

Does not the robust moral purpose of the Maritimes reveal itself in "Kinship," "The Heal-All," "A Song of Growth," "Earth’s Complines"?

Does not the work men do, down here beside the sea, find a faithful expression in that sequence of noble sonnets. Songs of the Common Day, and in the lyric beauty of The Book of the Native? Take this from "An Epitaph for a Husbandman":

"His fields he had to leave.
His orchards cool and dim;
The clods he used to cleave
Now cover him.

But the green, growing things
Lean kindly to his sleep—
White roots and wandering stringe
Closer they creep.

Because he loved them long
And with them bore his part.
Tenderly now they throng
About his heart."
(The Book of the Native)

Or this:

"Here clove the keels of centuries ago
Where now unvisited the flats lie bare.
Here soothed the sweep of journeying waters, where
No more the tumbling floods of Fundy flow.
And only in the sapphire pipes creep slow
The salty currents of the sap. The air
Hums desolately with wings that seaward fare.
Over the lonely reaches beating low
The wastes of hard and meager weeds are thronged
With murmurs of a past that time has wronged;
And ghosts of many an ancient memory
Dwell by the [buckish] pools and ditches blind,
In these low-lying pastures of the wind,
These marshes pale and meadows by the sea."
(The Salt Flats)

Does not the very soul of Canada, its tradition, pride and purpose, its beauty and its vastness, speak in such poems as: "O Child of Nations," "The Native," "Awake, My Country, the Hour is Great with Change!" and kindred ballads, odes and lyrics? Proud should we be that a son of this university made all this vocal in his undying song.

But we must leave him here, with lines he loves. They are entitled "The Summons," and I rather think he would wish that I should pass them on to you as his l’envoi, perhaps that, too, of the class of ’79 to the class of ’33:

"Deeps of the wind-torn West.
Flaming and desolate.
Up springs my soul from its rest
With your banners at the gate.

‘Neath this o’ermastering sky
How could the heart lie still
Or the sluggish will
Content in the old chains lie.
When over the lonely hill
Your torn wild scarlets cry.
Up, Soul, and out
Into the deeps alone,
To the long peal and the shout,
Of those trumpets blown and blown."

Bliss Carman

I should like to pause and read from some of the many hundreds of letters which passed between Carman and his teacher Parkin. They loved each other like father and son. No teacher lives more completely in a pupil than Parkin does in Carman.

Early Letters

I also wish there were time to read from the letters I possess written in Carman’s boyhood and youth. Those to and from his mother are among the most lovely ever written. Then there are others, to and from Roberts for instance. They began when Roberts was nine and Carman eight years old. Bliss had sent Charlie a hatchet for Christmas, and, in the earliest writing of the Dean of Canadian Letters (extant). Roberts tells Carman that it was the very thing he wanted, for he had two hammers and two saws and two gimlets, and just needed a hatchet!

Class Records

In his first year at the University I find that the future poet was examined on the preparation of hydrogen gas. He was also asked in an examination to draw a map of Ireland showing the west coast from Bantry Bay to Donegay Bay. An incipient poet may have played with the tradition of the Blessed Isles, the Land of the Heart’s Desire, somewhere in the Atlantic as his pencil traced the ragged west coast. In an English Literature test he had, among other things, to classify the nouns, pronouns, verbs, and correct or justify: "The rhinoceros is a kind of unicorn," and "A greater instance of a man’s being a blockhead I do not know." There was plenty of spice in the papers of those days! In 1880 Professor Wilkinson questioned the Juniors: "How are we to acquire copiousness in our words?" Also: "Propose a plan of study of English Literature of the last 500 years." Examinations then required occumenical knowledge, pens as swift as arrows, and wits that were "the sworn companions of the wind."

Early Poetic Flights

I have also Carman’s early attempts at verse. They began about this time, translations of Horace, Virgil and Hoer, as well as exercises in the ballade and triolet. There was little promise of future success. He seemed to be at seas as to his career. Even at Edinburgh, where he roomed with Pickard, the Gilchrist Scholar, he took lectures in Literature and Mathematics, but wrote no examinations. Only at Harvard, where he came under the influence of Professor Child, the ballad authority, and of Professor Royce, who assisted him in coordinating his scattered ideas into a working system, did he find himself.

Choice of a Career

The early numbers of the University of New Brunswick Monthly reveal and contain a number of tentative poems and some critical articles. The social and athletic life of the university, in which Roberts starred, apparently left him cold. He preferred a few cronies, long walks and his Malecite canoe. The Harvard Monthly carried a number of his poems, at fairly regular intervals, revealing a progressive skill in his craft. The great event, however, was his new friend Richard Hovey, the Black Richard of the Songs from Vagabonding, a great work but was more than a mere episode in American literature. His first book, Low Tide on Grand Pre, in 1893, gave Carman an unquestioned placed among the English lyric poets. The title poem was written at Windsor, where Carman had gone to spend the summer with Roberts. His first book and his last blossomed from his native soil. At the age of thirty-three Carman did a daring thing; he committed himself entirely to poetry as an avocation and never looked back. When Carman gave up teaching for law, and law for civil engineering, and ultimately everything for poetry, his father wrote in the last letter he was ever to pen: "Bliss has decided to use his brain less and his literature more."

His Thought

It is impossible to sum up the thought and style of Carman in a moment. He was a lyric poet, and depended upon music, mysterious effects, pageantry of colour and ecstasy for his effects. Whatever thought he had can not be called a system. It began with the orthodox beliefs of his home and Church, as did that of Roberts. He accepted God and immortality without question. He loved the Church, and never missed Holy Communion no matter what the weather. For many years he had been sidesman in the little church in New Caanan, Connecticut. When asked what book had exerted the greatest influence upon his style, he replied The Book of Common Prayer. As for the rest Parkin’s classical legacy, Arnold’s critical standards. Emerson’s transcendentalism, Delsarte’s unitrinian theories (which he imbibed from Mrs. Richard Hovey and Mary Perry King), then later Yoga, and still later Theosophy to which we owe "Shamballa." In all this you will discover, that the systems he sampled possessed great similarity in essentials and that, while there is a bewildering array of unrelated symbolism, mythical, Christian, oriental and medieval, still, in most of it, there recurs the idea of balance, rhythm, poise, ecstasy and personality, with a certain cosmic touch to give it all a semblance of a system.

Method

From this you may have guessed that Carman was not a profound student or a systematic on. He was more; he was a seer. And he was a singer by the grace of God. His method he called "listening in," a phrase borrowed from Emerson. He found, too, in Emerson’s "Method of Nature" a method well suited to himself, namely, that without haste he should wait he divine moment, and prepare himself as a fitting channel for the Over Soul, the Lord of his Heart’s Elation.

A Canadian

Carman roamed far, but always at heart he was a Canadian. He and his sister Murray never failed to remember Loyalist Day. His roots were here. All his life long Carman was sustained by memories and friendships in the Maritimes. His letters to his sister, to Roberts, Parkin and others prove that he was a Canadian and a Britisher to the core. Features of the landscape along the Silvermine, in Connecticut, or among the cloves of the Katskills appear in his poems, but the form and spirit of his great work was Canadian. He began with "Low Tide on Grand Pre," and his last published poem, which appeared in the Prince of Wale Legion Book, returned to his first love in the wistful beauty of "Forever and Forever," Canada, from sea to sea, was at the very centre of his being,

"I was sired among the surges;
I was cubbed beside the foam;
All my heart is in its verges,
And the sea wind is my home."

I should like to quote from "Low Tide," "Vestigia," "Arnold, Master of the Scud," "The Ships of Saint John," "Over the Roofs the Honey Coloured Moon," and others, but you know them all by heart. Always, in those lyrics and ballads, you hear the far call of this lovely valley.

"And all the pleasant rivers that seek
the Fundy foam,
They call me and call me to follow them home."

To the everlasting credit of your Government and this University the ashes of Bliss Carman were brought home. Yonder he lies, and generations will make pilgrimages to his shrine, reading thereon his valedictory:

Have little care that Life is brief.
And less that Art is long,
Success is in the silence,
Though fame is in the song.

Francis Sherman

How the chain of interdependence grows! Roberts’ full-fledged precocity in Orion inspired confidence in Carman. When Francis Sherman published his modest booklet, In Memorabilia Mortis, he inscribed a copy—"To Bliss Carman form his old pupil F.S." Life grows out of life; it keeps growing when fed by sympathetic understanding.

Tardy Recognition of Poets

Kipling wrote Francis Sherman: "It must be a gorgeous thing to be one of the band of new singers. You don’t know how much Canada lies in your hands and Canada doesn’t either." William Archer, Matthew Arnold, Oscar Wilde, William Dean Howells and others had written Roberts, Carman, Scott and Lampman in the same vein. And yet recognition on the whole was tardy.

Careless of Fame

Francis Sherman even yet is almost unknown, save to a scant dozen perhaps. Reserved and utterly careless of fame, he pursued his banking duties as a means of livelihood. When not balancing ledgers and making reports he cultivated the garden of his soul.

Enhanced Poetical Tradition

Sherman enhanced the poetical tradition of his University and of the Dominion. He drew a circle round his art, and stepped inside.

He was satisfied with nothing short of perfection in technical skill, and in the sonnet form took his place beside Lampman and Roberts as a master.

Sherman not only demanded impeccable form and finish of himself, he likewise aimed at ripeness. Range he desired, new experience both broad and deep, but above all they must mellow in the oak, and become rich and ripe.

The classic finish of his work was warmed with glamorous colour, just as the perfection of form in the marbles of [Praxiteles] was enhanced by the splendour of the colouring that Nikias gave them. All the tints of the wheeling seasons in the valley he loved flash from his small but perfect canvases.

His work is also rich in nature and humanity. Francis Sherman never forgot, in all his passionate pursuit of subtle rhythms and the perfect phrase, the old sweet burdens of humanity. Clear he ever was at times his lines are almost naked in their simplicity and all for one purpose that man himself might shine through. Charm and swift insight he possessed after the manner of Landor and De Quincy, but he aimed rather to "cause a hear to beat beneath the ribs of death."

His Work

To one who ahs made the acquaintance of Francis Sherman, the temptation is very great to quote him at length.

"A Prelude" is rather long, and should not be dismembered. Its beauty is all of a piece, and almost overwhelming.

In Memorabilia Mortis is a series of sonnets one should know. How sure and certain is their art; how wise and ripe their thought!

Then, too, there are the sonnets The Deserted City, and I recall one fashioned in perfect art. It is called "The House of Colour":

"Mine gold is here; yea, heavy yellow gold,
Gathered ere Earth’s first days and nights were fled;
And all the walls are hung with scarfs of red,
[Broddered] in fallen cities, fold on fold;
The stained window’s saints are [sureoled];
And all the texture of the East are spread
On the paved floor, whereon I lay my head,
And sleep and count the coloured things of old.
Once when the hills and I were all aflame
With envy of the pageant in the West
(Except the somber pine-tree whence there came, continually the sign of their unrest),
A lonely crow sailed past me, black as shame.
Hugging some ancient sorrow to his breast."

A Rich Inheritance

But enough! I have tried to leave with you my fugitive thoughts on a few of the writers of The University of New Brunswick and the New Dominion. I have endeavoured to show the great tradition into which you have been brought, and to kindle your pride in this rich inheritance. Not all of you, perhaps, will become illustrious in the field of art, letters or music, or leave immortal things to your credit in philosophy or the sciences. Yet every one of you may live the good life of truth and beauty ,becoming artists in your own way. By a sensitive awareness to the rich and costly offerings of the seers and saints and singers o the world, by a sympathetic understanding of those works in which they "sang their passion to immortal sleep," you may cast up a highway of eager expectancy along which these Master Builders may come to their waiting kingdoms. And so let us to the task! My own parting word, and the l’envoi of your Alma Mater, are best expressed in the ringing words of Francis Sherman, who passed this way long years before you. It is entitled "A Life," and appeared in Matins, his first book:

"Let us rise up and live! Behold, each thing
Is ready for the moulding of our hand.
Long have they all waited our command,
None other will they ever own for kind,
Until we come no bird dare try to sing,
Nor any sea its power may understand;
No buds are on the trees; in every land
Year asketh year some tidings of our Spring.

Yea, it is time, high time we were awake!
Simple indeed shall life be unto us.
What part is ours? To take what all things give;
To fell the whole world growing for our sake;
To have sure knowledge of the marvelous;
To laugh and love. Let us rise up and live!"